Pro football’s falling TV viewership is about a lot more than the kneeling protests, argues Theodore Kupfer at National Review: “The problem football faces is whether it is too violent to survive.” Take the Dec. 4 Steelers-Bengals game: “Were parents more likely to let their boys try out for Pop Warner next year after watching Juju Smith-Schuster inflict a brain injury on Vontaze Burfict?” A century ago, he notes, President Teddy Roosevelt help pressure changes: “A slew of innovations, from passing to helmets, improved the sport and reduced the carnage.” Yet now the NFL must face facts about brain damage from repeated blows to the head. The decline of boxing is a warning of how “avarice plus undeniable brutality equals trouble for a sport.” He calls for top-to-bottom reform: “Radical changes such as abolishing the three-point stance or eliminating helmets should be studied alongside simpler tweaks such as teaching different tackling techniques at the youth level.”

Ethicist: Don’t Just ‘Do Something’ About Social Media

Amid the growing worries that social media are “eroding the quality of discourse necessary to sustain democracy,” Eileen Donahoe warns at The American Interest: “Be careful not to undermine democratic values in the name of protecting democracy.” Policymakers need to know what they’re doing, not just “do something.” For example, “User-generated content simply posted on Facebook should not be conflated with newsfeed content pushed to the top of the feed by algorithms.” And foreign disinformation campaigns are distinct from “political filter bubbles.” We need a “do no harm” mentality, aiming “to stop malign actors while protecting free expression.”

From the left: I Failed To Speak Up Against Perv Judge

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick confesses that she’s been disgusted by federal Judge Alex Kozinski for decades, ever since she clerked for a different jurist on the 9th Circuit and experienced his highly inappropriate behavior first-hand. “But it was 1996”: There was nothing obvious to do about it. Now a Washington Post report citing several other ex-clerks, two on the record, has prompted Lithwick to speak out. Her experiences weren’t as bad as theirs, but: “In so many of his interactions with me, and conversations around me, Judge Kozinski has always gone one step over the line of appropriate sexual discourse.” And “because he is powerful . . . those in his circle got dragged along into a world that diminishes and belittles women.” She realizes that staying silent all these years made her complicit, and concludes, “Somewhere along the way I managed to create a career for myself. In part, I did it by keeping secrets. I’d like to be done with that now.”
Journalist: The Real Media Bias on the Mideast

Press predictions of mass violence after President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital proved false, Yair Rosenberg notes at Tablet, and bias explains the failure — “Just not the kind you think.” It’s not about the press favoring Israel or the Palestinians, but “a different sort of bias: towards conflict and action.” It’s a recurring problem: “The combination of the massively disproportionate number of journalists in Israel/Palestine with the relative paucity of actual action on the ground inevitably leads to magnification of every solitary spark — even when it is not actually newsworthy, and even when it is largely staged.”
Security desk: The FBI Scandal Hiding in Plain Sight

“The government’s release of the private texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page,” says Eli Lake at Bloomberg, “is an astonishing breach of privacy.” Yes, some look bad, such as Strzok’s text about an “insurance policy” if Trump is elected. But “it’s also inconclusive” — something for Justice Department and congressional investigators to look into, while the rest of us “should reserve judgment.” It reminds Lake of the weeks before the election, when FBI officials leaked their complaints about the aborted probe of the Clinton Foundation. “Back then, the same Republicans who now accuse the FBI of trying to destroy Trump were cheering the bureau’s last-minute intervention in the election on his behalf.”